Naomi Wolf's Vagina and the Case for Tender Sex

In her mid-forties, Naomi Wolf stopped enjoying sex. Specifically, she stopped being able to have vaginal orgasms. After visiting various physicians, she discovered to her surprise and relief that the cause wasn't psychological but physical. Wolf had been born with a mild form of spina bifida. Her inability to orgasm was due to a spinal compression of one of the larger pelvic nerves, a condition which, after surgery, disappeared.

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From this fascinating story of personal discovery, Wolf spins out, in her book Vagina: A New Biography, what she considers an original vision about the place of vagina in society and culture. It all brought me back to the mid-nineties, not a time of particularly great style or lucidity in writing. A sample of Wolf's antique identity politics:

Throughout this book, I will be referring to a state of mind or a condition of female consciousness I will call, for ease of reference, but also for the sake of the echo, "the Goddess." I don't mean to summon up in your mind crunchy-granola, 1970s images of pagan Goddess worship on all-female retreats in state parks, nor am I intending a simplistic, pop-culture shorthand for self-esteem. Rather, I am carving out rhetorical space that does not yet exist when we talk about the vagina, but which refers to something very real.

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Of course all I can think about after reading that is crunchy-granola all-female retreats and simplistic pop-culture shorthand — the book is certainly full enough of both. More disappointingly, I learned very little about sex. Wolf's big insight is that women are "wired differently," that their sexual tastes and the way they experience sex is rooted in physical differences. Similarly, we are treated to the revelation that women tend to have really great orgasms when there is lots of foreplay and they feel intimately connected with their partner. If you didn't already know that, I'm surprised your reading this, because I'm surprised you can read.

There is nonetheless something vitally important in this book. We live in a time full of violent and degrading sex. Every fifteen-year-old boy in America has access to pictures of women with baseball bats shoved in them, and we have no idea what the effects will be. The founders of pornography in its current state despised women, which is perhaps why the generic format of almost all porn is demeaning. Alain de Botton, among others, has recently proposed an ethical porn. It's an intriguing idea. But so far it's just an idea.

We are also living in a time when the bestseller list is dominated by S&M books written by women for women. The milquetoast sexual violence of Fifty Shades of Grey has resulted in the fastest-selling book in history. (Read Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? if you want more original games of domination.) Wolf has a vague explanation for the ubiquity of sexual violent imagery by women:

The difficult secret is that there is something about power — or skill, or mastery of a situation — in men that is so erotic to many heterosexual woman, and that probably has to do with that hormonal variation that leaves us alert to high-testoterone signals, as well as the "good stress" of SNS activation in a context a woman can ultimately control.

In short, Naomi Wolf is out of touch. Everybody's into at least spanking these days. Wolf's innocence is a good thing, though. Because Wolf's book reminds us of the power of loving, tender sex. Our culture has lost contact with the basic, obvious truth that the best sex is sex with someone you love. The best orgasms you have had or will have emerge out of intimacy. The single most daring part of Vagina is when Wolf goes to visit a "sexual healer" in Britain. The scene was only sort of ruined by the fact that she didn't actually sleep with him. It was not shocking, of course, that women were paying a man for sex. Who cares? We're all grown-ups, and, and we're all going to hear a lot more about sex therapy when The Sessions enters the Oscar race this fall. The shocking part was during the session, when the "healer" stared into Wolf's eyes for an hour. That, I thought, takes serious guts. Anybody can play games with whips and cords and silver balls. But to look into somebody's eyes for an hour? Who has the courage to do that?

Wolf's terminally old-fashioned book reads somewhat like a letter from a kinder and, I have to say, more fulfilled time:

I remember being again in the small upstairs bedroom of the little cottage upstate; my partner and I had just made love. I looked out of the window at the trees tossing their new leaves and the wind lifting their branches in great waves, and it all looked like an intensely choreographed dance, in which all of nature was expressing something. The moving grasses, the sweeping tree branches, the birds calling from invisible locations in the dappled shadows, seemed, again, all to be in communication with one another. I thought: it is back."

Perhaps this book is the opening signal of a more general return. It's time for the American bedroom to get soft again.